Improving Social Media Engagement

Do you find that, no matter how many followers you get across social media, those people still aren't engaging with you — at least not to the level you would like?

Most people (generally speaking) use social media on their phones. Consequently, they have the tendency to scan — not read. But if these people are not reading but scanning, how do you get their attention?

In my experience working with charities, organisations, and non-profits over the years, the best way to get attention on social media is through the proper use of imagery. Give the average social media user the option of clicking on a text post or on a big, beautiful, compelling image, they'll opt for the great image almost every time.

Yet so many of the Drupal sites I work on disregard this. They leave completely to chance the image that appears on social media when a page on their site is shared.

Why?

They don't have the right social media meta tags in place.

A meta tag is a piece of hidden code that exists in every page on your site; and a social media type tag tells Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. which text and image to use when that page is shared on their networks.

If you've ever shared one of your site pages on Facebook, for example, but the Facebook post hasn't included the image expeted to see, it's because the social meta tags in the page are missing.

The social networks also look for other tags in the page. Most importantly, the title and text tags. If these tags are also missing from your page, you'll see inconsistent results when sharing.

But not to worry. This is all pretty easy to take care of.

Fixing how your site content appears in social media consists of three things.

1: produce a spreadsheet of all the social meta tags that are in-place across your entire site

2: set up the tools in the Drupal back-end, enabling you to set the Facebook, Twitter etc. text, title and image for each page

3: go through the site in the back-end, changing social media title, text and images to exactly what you need them to be

I help people with the first two items in that list — producing a social media tag audit and giving you the tools you need to manage them. Then you can work on the last item at your leisure.

I've worked with lots of people — cleaning up and preparing their sites for social media — and it's always been worth it. People have generally reported increases in sales, increases in unique visitors and page views, and increases in engagement in general.

Social media is not quite the new SEO — but it's not far behind. So don't leave it to chance.